Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Back to School, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah are the most common holidays that work for many online fundraising programs.  This year, we added the March Madness college basketball tournament into the mix for Habitat for Humanity International.  Habitat usually does a big “match” fundraising campaign every March, and this year we decided to connect the theme to the basketball tournament to see if we could garner some additional interest from Habitat supporters.

Email messages, website promotions, donation pages, web remarketing banners and Facebook content all featured a common basketball theme and catchy calls to action connected to the basketball tournament.  Donors were invited to vote for their favorite team after making a donation, and social media drew extra attention to the appeal.

The fighting in Libya and then the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan all probably impacted Habitat’s March Match fundraising campaign, but you can’t plan for those events!   What you can plan is to get a match, create a consistent theme and message, adopt a deadline for giving, and repeat the ask.

Michael Stein is a Senior Account Executive at Donordigital, the online fundraising, marketing, and advertising company. Contact: michael@donordigital.com or phone (510) 473-0364.